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Hangtime writes "The world's most valuable source code could be in the wild. According to a report by Reuters, a Russian immigrant and former Goldman Sachs developer named Sergey Aleynikov was picked up at Newark Airport on July 4th by the FBI on charges of industrial espionage. According to the complaint, Sergey, prior to his early June exit from Goldman, copied, encrypted and uploaded source code inferred to be the code used by Goldman Sachs to process in real-time (micro-seconds) trades between multiple equity and commodity platforms. While trying to cover his tracks, the system backed up a series of bash commands so he was unable to erase his history, which would later give him away to Goldman and the authorities. So the question is: where are the 32MB of encrypted files that Sergey uploaded to a German server?

Depends on how their systems are organized and which root(s) you have. Having root to the source, build or test server doesn't necessarily mean you would be able to disrupt/modify trades on the production server. Even if you had root to the production server you may be able to disrupt/shutdown trades but modifying trades could require access to an Oracle server somewhere else. It all depends on if Goldman has any clue about system security.

What if having the code allowed you to analyse it for ways to game the system? Knowing precisely how the system will react in certain circumstances could give you a serious leg up when attacking the system on the markets (trade limitations, trend spotting for error codes or edge cases et al).

This code could be worth significant amounts of money on the international fraud market.

Exactly. Analyzing the source code will tell you how Goldman Sachs trades its stuff. It's not valuable because it was so expensive to develop this stuff, it's expensive because it shows how they play the game with what kind of strategy, and the stakes of the game is extremely high. It's like knowing how your opponent plays poker when the stakes are on the magnitude of billions of dollars.

If the source code is in the wild, Goldman Sachs is forced to stop all related real-time trades, because their strategy is completely exposed, and once somebody exploits it, they will lose money really quickly. (Just imagine how many transactions they can make per second, and imagine every one of those transactions lose some money in average.) That means they get forced to leave the market until they develop a new trading system, or at least, re-develop their strategy. That costs a lot of money because they have to stop doing investments and leave the money some place safe.

"While in the good old days the banking business was simply a place to store and borrow money, it has now become a mess so complicated that nobody really understands it anymore."

The real problem is that stocks are a legalized ponzi sceheme and should be done away with entirely, it's basically a ponzi scheme through abstraction using machiens so you don't see the other people trying to fuck one another over for personal gain.

Securities themselves are the problem they allow the wealthy to suck wealth out of

It's more like multi-level marketing than a ponzi. With a ponzi scheme, it's impossible to carry on long-term because the offer (investment) generally has no intrinsic value whatsoever. With multi-level marketing, the offer (product/service) generally does have value, but it comes with an overly inflated price resulting in a large number of people losing money in order to have others make money.

One hole.If the company pays dividends to the shareholders of say 5 or 10 percent and you simply buy and do no more you'll eventually make back your investment over 10-20 years.Now if you want to make money short term the thing to do is of course to go for the quick profit but shares don't have to be a hole to throw money into.

Investment is different from speculation which is different from mere gambling.

The way investment and speculation have been handled over the last decade or so, it's really hard to see how it's different from mere gambling -- or, as the GP said, one big legalized ponzi scheme.

Back in the middle of the.COM era, if you had a web-site and a company name, your stock could trade at a value which would be 100 years income. Certainly Enron and lots of other examples tell us that the people who we're supposed to t

Not necessarily. IANAE but they probably make money off the transactions, whoever makes them, and whoever profits from them. I think it would be analogous to obtaining the source code for the DowJones stock scoring system. DJ wouldn't be the first/most affected by it. Please correct me if i'm wrong.

Excellent! If knowing the source code for _financial trading mechanisms_ allows for gaming the system, then it's a very good thing that the code was exposed. If anything, I'd expect banking code to resist outside intrusion.

I'm not talking about exploits or bugs, I'm talking about knowing *precisely* how the code will react in given circumstances, *precisely* which edge cases are handled in code, *precisely* what results in an error state and how that error state is handled.

Knowing such things will allow you to tailor your fraudulant trades so as to not raise suspicion, or to make more money within a set amount of time. If you know precisely how far to push your actions, and then push no further, then you could continue with the same fraud for longer than you would otherwise without being discovered. If you know how often the trend analysis reports are run, and how they do what they do, then you can tailor your trades so as to not appear on those reports - just enough, no more.

All of which means you can make more money without being detected - and you haven't attacked the software itself, you haven't changed how the code works, you have stayed within the boundaries that the software creates. All because you knew *precisely* how the code works.

I'm talking about knowing *precisely* how the code will react in given circumstances,

It's an advantage for sure, but maybe not a slam dunk. It's likely that those systems are highly parameter driven. Without knowing the values of whatever tables they have set up for the day/hour/minute your trades could get smacked pretty hard before figuring it out.

Knowing such things will allow you to tailor your fraudulant trades so as to not raise suspicion, or to make more money within a set amount of time. If you know precisely how far to push your actions, and then push no further, then you could continue with the same fraud for longer than you would otherwise without being discovered

And if the public has access to this source code, we can figure out how someone trying to avoid detection would behave and nab them. Someone out there has access to this source cod

"If someone creates a model that predicts where the oil futures will go based on past performance in similar circumstances, you think that person should be required by law to reveal his model?"

Yes.

"Wouldn't that make it nearly impossible to make money in the stock market"

Yes. That would mean the stock market would be an *efficient market* and would do the job it's supposed to do: direct investment to sources of real value (long-term, planet-wide improvement in social conditions) rather than short-term Prisoner's Dilemma-style scams and ripoffs.

"and the only buying and selling would be people looking to begin investing in blue chips for the long haul"

YES. This would redirect the attention of the economy to solving the vitally important long-term problems of the world.

"thus reducing investment in companies"

No, only reducing investment in short-term rip-offs.

"thus reducing R&D, thus reducing innovation?"

No, it would expose the true sources of R&D investment, which remain what they've always actually been: groups like DARPA with funds and a long-term vision and commitment.

If your long-term R&D funding model is driven solely by expectation of short-term returns and REQUIRES obfuscation and deception between investors seeking self-interest rather than honest and transparent public dissemination of scientific knowledge, your society is already screwed no matter how you try to cut the cake.

Long-term, planetary scale R&D requires long-term, planetary scale wisdom and cooperation. There's no way around this. You can't boost the system by making individuals fight each other like starving rats in a fog of ignorance and think somehow that will generate good vibes of positivity and constructive progress. It won't.

The online gambling industry analyzes the games made on their system against games played by known gambling software to identify players cheating.

Perhaps GS haven't immediately stopped real-time trading using their existing system because they're able to analyze trades made by other brokerages to identify patterns that would indicate whether their own trading system is being used by others.

Passwords can be easily changed by any old sysadmin, with minimal damage, as long as the passwords are changed quickly, or remote access is locked out, the damage can easily be mitigated very rapidly.

Changing source code (to allay use of it by the thief to attack its owners, beat GS at their own game, or sell to competitors), is time-consuming, and requires the assistance of many software experts (programmers).

The damage can only be mitigated by shutting down the system, and waiting a long time for changes to get made, or for the software to get rewritten, to protect against evil third parties knowing the trading system's flaws.

This may end up being pretty damned interesting. GS has a long history of market manipulation from insider trading to installing plants in the media through subsidiaries who appear and disappear over-night to gaming IPOs to make sure the right people get a payday (ie. Yang and Yahoo). Though I wouldn't hold my breath, stacking the deck against suckers is generally "nothing to see here" issue.

Be fair: Goldman Sachs has way more control over government policies than a mere root password would give them. They don't just have root passwords, they have root passwords, physical access, and insider support.

There is a pretty good expose [rollingstone.com] up on Rolling Stone describing the nefarious behavior of Goldman Sachs. They are in general what you expect out of Wall Street types, greedy and unscrupulous but very good at what they do. Unfortunately what they are good at is creating devastation in their wake so they can take home multimillion dollar bonuses every year, and completely controlling our government so they can get away with it.

I skimmed the Rolling Stone article, and it was difficult to find any specific evidence for what Taibbi is asserting. I have no doubt that Goldman is a huge behemoth that abuses its position to affect markets in a way that benefits itself at the expense of lower-tier investors, which makes it doubly dissapointing that Taibbi mounts such a weak attack. He chooses to fill his "expose" with invectives like [t]he world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. To prove this point, he simply lists the former Goldman employees which are now, or were, in positions of power. I find the Frontline documentaries on this topic to be much more rational and informing:

The platform is one of the things that apparently gives Goldman a leg-up over the competition when it comes to rapid-fire trading of stocks and commodities. Federal authorities say the platform quickly processes rapid developments in the markets and uses top secret mathematical formulas to allow the firm to make highly-profitable automated trades.

Down here in Brasil, there is an interesting card game called Truco ("trick me"/"triple up" portmanteau in Portuguese) -- every college student in my State plays it:-D One of the most interesting rules is: "you can cheat as long as nobody catches you in the act". The financial market is based exactly on the same rule.

Even more interesting is in the second article that notifies us that Goldman Sachs has been removed from the NYSE 15 Most Active Members Firms Weekly Report. GS had been #1 the week before and now they're not even on it. These fifteen firms alone represent about 98% of all trades with the NYSE. So what happened?

The author mentions some things but gives no clear motivation for GS hiding their stats. I would speculate that if one of your developers copied your code and uploaded it to a server discretely, you could have that in your logs and not notice it for days or weeks. But if he then did something to your system to ensure his new employer's ownership of that code you wuold notice that pretty damn fast I imagine. Sergey Aleynikov sounds like a brilliant coder but maybe he's not so smart on legal issues, is it possible he completely hobbled GS to please his new employer? Are they keeping their transaction report hush hush so investers don't worry? Was Sergey Aleynikov thinking he could sell the code and the rights to the code? After all, if he could remove all copies of the code from GS how could they take people to court over the code without a local copy to prove ownership?

If GS remained #1, they would have left themselves on the list. I presume that something else related to this has gone wrong with their operation, the news just hasn't broke yet.

It seems unlikely to me that any single person, or even small group of people, would have the capability to remove all copies of this code, binary and source, from the company's information infrastructure.

Is it possible that they have suspended use of this code because they fear that someone analyzing it could profit from the trades it would have made?

It seems unlikely to me that any single person, or even small group of people, would have the capability to remove all copies of this code, binary and source, from the company's information infrastructure.

Ah, the double edged sword of secrecy. Keep the location of your secrets solitary so that you don't have to keep track of multiple copies. With every new location it is stored, the odds of corporate espionage double. Had they ascribed to keep it in one place, this would be all too possible. And let's face it, if you're shelling out $400k to one or two developers, you do checks on them and make sure they can handle the keys to the palace.

Is it possible that they have suspended use of this code because they fear that someone analyzing it could profit from the trades it would have made?

I had not thought of this, although I believe these transactions would be done on secure networks with insane encryption. Again, if you're shelling out $400k to a developer, you're probably laying fiber straight to the NYSE's servers from yours or at least including a level of encryption that is so high it would take the NSA days to decrypt it -- rendering the data worthless as it's public by then.

Still if they don't understand how it works, I could see them doing that. I could not, however, see them sacrificing a week's worth of trading for these fears without first researching them. Do you know how much money and customers that would cost them?

including a level of encryption that is so high it would take the NSA days to decrypt it

Keep in mind that encryption, right now, can be strong enough to take millions of years to decrypt.

You, sir, are correct. Although, I must inquire that if you're making several thousand transactions a week and you're writing software to whereby the transaction frequency matters to you (probably down to the millisecond) do you have the time to waste in encrypting/decrypting this? I would imagine that while it would take millions of years to decrypt it would also take several seconds to encrypt. That's time they don't have.

Also, if you are doing transaction with foreign institutions or exchanges th

I had not thought of this, although I believe these transactions would be done on secure networks with insane encryption.

Knowing the algorithms that Goldman Sachs uses to do realtime trades could possibly give you insider information you wouldn't have otherwise had. When doing realtime transactions, if you know the ORDER Goldman Sachs will use to do the transactions, for instance, you could buy certain stocks a minute or two before Goldman Sachs does...since the act of GS (or anyone) buying a stock will increase its trading price some, and you've just automatically made money and hurt GS at the same time.

This type of insider trading information will likely result in criminal prosecution by the SEC, however, so don't try this at home, kiddies.

On the week ending June 19, Goldman, for instance, was ranked first on the NYSE program trading list. But on the week of June 22, Goldman mysteriously didnâ(TM)t appear on the list of the top 15 firms at all.

So unless the Fourth of July is celebrated in June, I think that's not the issue.

Of course, I'm not checking the volume of trading either, so there could be something to your theory. (Of course, if GS bailed out for a week, wouldn't that lower the volume significantly? Weren't they the number one traders?)

TFS says that his history file was backed up while he was Hacking The Gibson. He might have cleared his.history afterwards but presumably didn't know about/didn't have access to/didn't bother clearing the backup.
TFA doesn't mention anything about his history btw, but slashdot wouldn't lie to me.

Not likely... since most financial institutions capture not only the commands, but the output to STDOUT/STDERR, and that is logged outside, upstream of the physical machine, using tools like PowerBroker, Sudoscript, and others.

I know, because I work for $LARGE_BANK, and we use it there. You can't just symlink ~/.bash_history to/dev/null, or unset HISTSIZE or any of that.. even the !shell trick out of vim doesn't help, because everything you type and everything it outputs, is logged where you can't wipe it out.

Seems more likely he was caught by auditing through the audit daemon [die.net] in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It records both high level "actions" taken on the machine, and (in some cases) commands typed at the shell. Unless you have root (in some cases, even if you have root), it's hard to erase those logs.

But then, when I see industrial espionage by Russians, Chinese, Israelis, etc. against those very same corporations, a sense of nationalist anger makes me forget my anti-corporatist anger. Somehow I completely fail to have a sense of schadenfreude for the corporations that I normally hate, and I don't know why.

That us-and-them geographical, language or ethnicity identification is pretty weird. Try to cultivate the "scared bunny" / "everyone's out to get me" attitude and you won't feel sorry when a local coyote or mountain lion gets run over by a foreign truck.

The whole us/them left/right axis is just part of the circuses to distract the crowd. If you really want to see the us/them divide, it's the upper crust Kleptocrats against everyone else. We're all just cattle and cat food to them. The only way they can make the tens of thousands of dollars a minute they do is by harnessing the earning power of lots of ants and skimming off a bit of everyone else's productive power.

After WWII, the traditional pyramid shape of society (large number or poor, smaller number of middle class and very small number of upper class) changed towards more of a diamond shape. Ever since then, a lot of folks have been trying to revert that, driving down real wage gains while increasing productivity. All that benefit of efficiency has to go somewhere and it's not going down to the poor and it's not showing up in the paychecks of the works so it must be flowing up towards the top.

Unless TFA (didn't read) says Aleynikov was backed by a government, my guess is he was self-employed or being paid by a mafia organization. Look, it can be a Russian mafia if you want. Other than that, his surname isn't much evidence.

That's not due to capitalism, it's due to statism (having a government that goes way beyond its mandate). You can't fault companies for taking advantage of government perks, because if they don't, they can't compete in the marketplace. Again, the solution isn't more government regulation (which also has loophoes), but less (none!).

Good point but Goldman Sachs deserves to be loathed. They are behind some of the most malevolent behavior that has damaged our economy while they profit dating back to the Great Depression. They were probably a leading creator of the housing bubble and crash which has wiped out trillions of dollars of average peoples wealth. They are also leading commodity manipulators, they have a letter from the U.S. government exempting from commodity laws to prevent speculation. They may be partially responsible for

It's like The Force, you see. All around us, binding our processes behind the scenes in ways it takes an enlightened eye to perceive. There is always Linux prodding along the information swirls and eddies that make up our modern lives, unconcerned with the nature or usage of said information.

Windows is like The Force too, except I've never heard a Windows acolyte preach any path other than the quicker, easier, more seductive one...

I can't read the original article so I might be inferring something incorrect. But who on earth though it was a good idea to give internet access to someone with access to valuable source code? Whatever happened to role based access restrictions?

You don't need internet access that is in any way shared with your development work. Completely sandboxed internet access in a totally locked down thin client session might be OK, but you certainly don't need to be able to upload data to remote servers. If you think you do, you need to go and read up about segregation of duties.

But I don't expect you to agree. Your signature displays more about your attitude to the world than you perhaps realise.

You can get away with that when you're the NSA, but I'd suggest that a typical quant is not going to play nicely with a policy like that. I would rather take the risk than scare away talent by running a shop on that basis. At the end of the day, the contents of that guy's head are worth more than the mere code he was working on.

i'd respectfully suggest that the kind of quant that refuses to play nicely with security policies is the kind of quant that I'd rather not employ. And as I'm the kind of guy who gets to decide who works in parts of a financial services company, I'd also respectfully suggest that the kind of quant who refuses to play nicely with that kind of policy will find his career and earnings opportunities somewhat constrained compared with the kind of quant who's prepared to fit in with company policy.

Its hardly surprising that this sort of code is highly valuable but the challenge is surely going to be proving that it was actually stolen. If they have a bash history that doesn't include the IP addresses but just shows that he created a tar ball then where is the proof that he actually stole anything at all?

The original is of course still there, what he took is a copy, so you can't show something is missing.

They currently don't know where it has gone, so they can't prove that a copy was moved outside the firewall successfully

If he hasn't yet sold the stuff on they can't prove there was a financial benefit linked to the theft

So how will they prove beyond a reasonable doubt that some actual theft has gone on?

Its not like he has just lobbed it on Bit-torrent or posted it to Wikileaks. What he has done is taken a copy of the code, which means its Intellectual Property and copyright issues rather than "simple" theft and therefore they really need to prove (surely) that he has done something with the code.

Should be interesting to see how the police "generate" and prove the evidence on this one.

So how will they prove beyond a reasonable doubt that some actual theft has gone on?

If GS has any brains, they don't go after him in criminal court they go after him in civil court, where the statndard is the preponderance of evidence and then attach anything any everything that in his name to pay off the billions of dollars they will get from the jury.

All the while waiting on the feds to figure out how to nail him in criminal court, after all international spying is federal jurisdiction

Probably people that would do something similar, will never touch that code, for fear of be "tainted".

And anyway.. most code create new stuff that is worthy a patent. But not because most programmers are genius, but because the patent system is crap. No one sould care about what is on that code, because any professional can recreate the code anyway with the same features. There are not "sacred" code in this world. More the other stuff... Is really hard to make other people look at your code. The bussines type of guys dont want to look at your code. The users don't want to look at your code. Often, others programmers don't want to look at your code. Maybe is more valuable and interesting the features, and the documentation, the analysys of the problem, than the fucking source code. I do like to read source code, but I am one in a million (of programmers) and theres probably around 7 million programmers, so probably theres only another 7 dudes like me:-I

GS's code for program trading is all written in a proprietary programming language called slang and relies on a proprietary database (secdb).

The install for that is a hell of a lot bigger than 32 MB, so this is probably just a few trading algorithms that a pissed-off developer has copied away.

It will be largely useless without the slang and secdb components and will be totally unsafe to trade off without a sufficient source of historic data and reference data, correctly formatted and loaded into secdb.

The idea that this leak is likely to be in any way materially damaging to GS is frankly a joke to anyone with even a passing knowledge of how these systems really operate.

But don't let that get in the way of your paranoia about how the world works.

Of course, it wont be easy to install the whole system and then put those bits of code he stole on it and run it. But it is entirely possible those algos were not his, but coming from some of the very important core modules. It can still carry a large value.

If you didn't have a python/java/$LANGUAGE interpreter and no python/java/$LANGUAGE documentation you'd probably still be able to glean the logic and algorithms from the code. The trade secret is the algorithms not the computer instructions representing them.

i have a somewhat-better-than-passing knowledge of how these systems work. i'm very unconvinced by your explanation.

you seem to be assuming the intent would be to out-compete Goldman by re-implementing this system, perhaps with some changes/optimizations. for that, sure, you'd need the rest of the environment. but a good understanding of the algorithm and implementation could be obtained without the rest of the environment (like i can read C# code and extract the algorithms without having the rest of the environment). that seems like it would be enough to game Goldman's system (which is a sizable part of the system overall).

note that i am not asserting that this is a catastrophe for Goldman, just that your explanation isn't convincing. i will, however, agree with a previous poster that Goldman's sudden absence from NYSE's 15 most active members [nyse.com], rather than being #1 as they had for a good while, is very suspicious.

The article keeps referring to what was stolen as "codes". Does that mean "source code" or are they talking about some kind of access codes or authentication keys or something, like the way people call their bank PIN their "secret code" ?

If I were a rival to Goldman Sachs I would be terrified of someone offering me Goldman's source code. If I use it and Goldman find out then I'm in a world of trouble. If I use it but Goldman don't know for a bit AND the person who offered it knows I used it, then they can blackmail me. Even if I don't use it there could be expensive legal battles to prove my innocence ("Exhibit A shows the same loop variable counter is used in these two different source code bases." "?!"). How do I know it's not a trap? It would be like someone offering the secret of Coke to Pepsi - what do you expect Pepsi to do? Use the secret? What if they like their product more?

Obviously there must be another angle if this situation is true to drive someone to actually do it. I just can't figure it out at the moment.

Actually, Pepsi and Coke know each other's formulas. Have since the early nineteen hundreds. There's nothing really secret about the formula, it's just that people who prefer one to the other are already entrenched with marketing, and there isn't any incentive to switch brands on something that is exactly identical. As long as they've got slightly different tastes, they don't have to get into a price war.

Oh, and the KFC "secret blend of eleven herbs and spices"? All marketing. All that they really use

Crooks aren't always that smart. The guy may have the plan of "I take code, sell it to rival, I make millions," having not thought the practical matter through. As another poster noted, the Pepsi/Coke thing DID happen and what they did was contact the FBI.

While this isn't quite the same situation here, I'm betting the result would be the same. No legit corp wants to be involved in shit like this. It just wouldn't make sense and you'd stand to lose WAY more than you'd stand to gain. So they'd ignore the guy

I worked for a financial services company that had similar types of systems. The legal department and security people were always concerned about people stealing our source code.

But their fears were unfounded. Why? Because the source code is highly customized code that not only implements thoroughly non-standards-based algorithms, but is also tightly coupled to underlying hardware/software platforms (and the non-standardized APIs of their peer systems). The result: you can't run it anywhere but on the infrastructure of the company for which it was built. Sure, you could pull out a subroutine here or there. But overall, it's pretty worthless stuff.

Humorously, we had a large, difficult, multi-year project to port our code to a newer hardware platform (same O.S. and language tools). I joked that we should post all our source code on the web for free unencumbered download, and if somebody could get it to run on the newer (or any other) platform, we could pay them $2 million for their effort and still come out way ahead in the deal. Everybody laughed and agreed that that would be a dream come true.

you're only looking at reputable players here. sure, BofA won't touch GS's code, for a host of very good reasons like those you describe. but for someone looking to game GS's system, being able to run the code is totally unimportant: just reading it could likely be enough to extract exploitable characteristics.

Nope. You're unlikely to find interesting stuff there. The trading strategies mostly exist in the heads of traders, sometimes on their spreadsheets, sometimes in VB on their desktops, but rarely in the data centers.

It's easy to think of these companies as monoliths, but it's not like that at all. Most of them have grown through acquisition. The systems of the acquired companies are only loosely integrated into core systems. And you'd be surprised how competitive and autonomous their traders are...each one

Unless the shell is modified to append commands to the history file *before* executing them (as far as I know, no shell does that out of the box), or the system is hardened (exec() logging etc.), this will take care of any history logs.

'This week's NYSE Program Trading report was very odd.. what was shocking was the disappearance [blogspot.com] of the #1 mainstay of complete trading domination (i.e., Goldman Sachs) from not just the aforementioned #1 spot, but the entire complete list. In other words: Goldman went from 1st to N/A in one week'

"ALEYNIKOV claimed, however, that he only intended to collect "open source" files on which he had worked, but later realized he had obtained more files than he intended. ALEYNIKOV aslo admitted that he has uploaded files from his work desktop from home. ALEYNIKOV claimed he did not distribute any of the proprietary software that he obtained from the Financial Institution, and further claimed that he has abided by an agreement he entered into with his new employer not to use any unlicensed software"

Found a post on ACM by someone with same name as the accused. Looked like a person with research background in Neural Networks. No idea if it is the same person, but it would be intriguing to me if Goldman Sachs was using neural networks for trading.

One interesting facet: if two or more counterparties in a market had neural networks that were trained to coordinate and cooperate in ways that would violate trading rules (e.g. like bridge players sharing info through actions), would the company be liable if the neural networks had developed these exchanges by themselves? In other words, would it be an instrumentality for violating the law if it learned, on its own, to violate the law, and the programmers / administrators "had no idea" it was doing that?

Listen I am going to drop a huge bombshell on how GS makes their money and it has nothing to do with source code or trading. Ready?

Step 1: Buy RepublicansStep 2: Hedge investment and buy DemocratsStep 3: Create illusion that there is a difference between above to avoid discovery that you own both. Get people to vote for their party each election, one thing you don't want is for people catch on and vote against all incumbents which you are heavily invested into and who have been there long enough to feel comfortable bending rules or outright breaking law.Step 4: Make money trading stocks, bonds and commodities using leverage from 1,2,3 and 5.Step 5: If nobody to buy, have former GS executives run. See Corzine - D - NJ Governor and Paulson - R - Former Treasury Secretary.Step 6: If GS fails to make money on step 4, get politicians to bail you out indirectly to avoid blame. For example get them to bailout your failing investment AIG, then have AIG kick you back the $20 billion you gave them. Sure take direct bailout money, but give it back should public try to regulate GS salaries or demand transparency.Step 7: Act like you are better at making money because you are really really smart and it has nothing to do with the fact that you are in a position to change the rules. Look down on little people and small businesses trying to compete while playing by rules.Step 8: As if making money trading actual items by influencing markets/politicians isn't profitable enough, kick it up a notch and make money trading... wait for it... nothing. Call it Cap 'n Trade, make people think it will help environment, knowing that in truth it will not cut back on global pollution, that it will ship manufacturing to other countries along with jobs. Tell people it doesn't tax them and will create jobs (I mean with all the money GS execs will be making they can higher more gophers to get them coffee and they will be going out in NYC to eat expensive meals and that will employ aspiring actors... I mean waiters). Don't tax/charge people directly just tax companies, services and products the people cannot do without. When prices go up on those things blame the very companies that GS and US federal government are robbing with a pen (guns are so small time) and say it is their... wait for it... "selfish greed". Have system in place so the shares of nothing you are trading become more and more rare over time to ensure you get larger and larger pay outs and hope US public is to stupid to vote out every paid politician you had in your pocket to vote for it. Rememeber avoid and deflect, blame the other side.Step 9: If questioned or called out, act as if there is no way the person pointing out truth could possibly understand the complexities of the system and therefore and unqualified to comment. If person is in energy production label them greedy capitalistic ways". If somebody from any other sector of economy comes forward to detail insanity of scam, I mean legislation, label them a racist or proclaim they don't care about... wait for it... "the children". If person is using slashdot then mod them -1 TROLL.Step 10: Goto Step 1.

There is a long article in Rolling Stone magazine this month, The Great American Bubble Machine [rollingstone.com], alleging that banks control the U.S. government and that Goldman Sachs is one of the leaders of the corruption. Anyone wanting to know more about how the financial corruption of the U.S. government is operated should read the article. The article alleges that Goldman Sachs will use any manipulation whatsoever to get money.

Beginning in 2002, Warren Buffett began very publicly calling derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction" [bbc.co.uk]. That particular part of the corruption was caused by the removal of laws designed to prevent fraud, at the beginning of George W. Bush's first term. Nothing was done to reinstate the laws, and that's why we are suffering now. Why was nothing done? Numerous articles say the corruption was allowed to happen because Goldman Sachs people control the U.S. government's Federal Reserve Bank. To give a small indication of the level of corruption, the "Federal Reserve Bank" is not federal, there is nothing in reserve, and it is not a bank.

1) The linked article is not the article published on paper in Rolling Stone, although confusingly it has the same name.

2) A Slashdot comment is not meant to be a complete discussion of anything. A Slashdot comment can alert you to the need to do further research.

3) The actual Rolling Stone article in the paper edition only says things that have been reported elsewhere.

4) The bankers certainly knew there would be a crash, and that they would profit from the crash, and that the crash would be very destructive to everyone else.

5) Matt Taibbi's article, The 52 Funniest Things About The Upcoming Death of The Pope [nypress.com] lacks any humor. It's just stupid. In number 26, he guesses that the pope lives, and he dies. The point of the article seems to be that the pope gets less respect now; a big difference from 50 years ago. But it's a terrible article.